shanhuan manton
ig: @hpymntn
shanhuan [at] proton [dot] me
forays along a winding path through assemblages leaning upon each other
I was first drawn to Solidarity Infrastructures last year through a vortex of serendipitious events over the past few years - (some Cosmic Algorithm?) but wasn’t able to take it. Thankfully in the year since I’ve swirled down a vortex of community assemblages that have greatly informed the way that I understand community and infrastructure…
If one makes an analogy of life as a wandering path through landscapes, then joining this session of Solidarity Infrastructures was a moment of returning to a beautiful space I didn't have time to linger in last time I encountered it. Having had many experiences along the wandering route since the last time I saw the offering, a serendipitous opportunity for some synthesis and integration, for inquiring towards deeper understanding of some of the beautiful clearings and thickets and entanglements I’d been moving through before. As an amateur mycologist, the prompts to explore the infrastructure around us feel like the process of going on a foray, especially the ones I tend to engage with which are less about collecting anything to bring home or consume, but more about gaining a deeper understanding of the beings we encounter and their relationships to the ecosystems they live in.
I strive towards what Patricia Kaishian & Hasmik Djoulakian describe in Mycology as a Queer Discipline as relying "upon queer methodologies for knowledge acquisition given both the nonbinary, cryptic, and subsversive biological nature of fungi, as well as a hegemonic, Western, cultural rendering of fungi as perverse and unworthy of formal investigation." For quite some time the majority of investigation into fungi, at least in the dominant Western imperial cultures, has been for the purposes of extracting value and exercising control- whether from the perspective of forestry and agriculture industries, to whom fungi are primarily “plant pathogens” or to extract value from. Might the same be true for investigating the internet, networks of digital devices, and human infrastructures in general? what queer methodologies, subversive modes of gaining deeper understanding, might we apply in exploring infrastructures, those often-overlooked, misunderstood, entangled with nearly everything entities which make possible entire worlds?
Solidarity Infrastructures feels like a similar queer methodology for investigating the internet, networks of all sorts, and infrastructures too. A subversion of the hegemonic understanding which posits infrastructure as fixed and having singular, perfect or supreme manifestations, and an intentional choice to look at the patchy, fuzzy, porous, inscrutable, indefinable, ephemeral, constantly transforming, intersectional aspects of the structures that underpin our world.
I am reminded of Donna Haraway's Staying with the Trouble: “It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories.”
Infrastructure as the knots that hold stories together, hold worlds together, make worlds through their processes...
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“One of the ways that I've approached this is thinking through what infrastructure hides, and when infrastructure becomes visible to us. A number of years ago, a scholar named Susan Leigh Star did a bunch of work around infrastructures, and essentially said that functional infrastructures tend to disappear from sight. Once they become embedded in our everyday, we start to forget that they're there and lose sight of the fact that they profoundly structure how our lives are made to work. Another theorist, Brian Larkin, followed up not very many years later and said that infrastructures become invisible for those that they are designed to serve. People that intrastructures are not designed to serve, are actually usually really keenly aware of it.”
Hiʻilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart - https://www.greendreamer.com/podcast/hiilei-hobart-cooling-the-tropics -
Susan Leigh Star - Ethnography of Infrastructure: https://ics.uci.edu/~wscacchi/GameLab/Recommended%20Readings/ethnography-infrastructure-Star-1999.pdf
“The act of defining an infrastructure is a categorizing moment. Taken thoughtfully, it comprises a cultural analytic that highlights the epistemological and political commitments involved in selecting what one sees as infrastructural (and thus causal) and what one leaves out.”
Brian Larkin - The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure - https://shiftingground.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/1-Larkin.pdf
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This map is only a fraction of the infrastructure that that sustains my ongoing inquiries….
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Infrastructure Dreams:
Tools for Rapid Convergence
Protocols for Intentional Convergence
New Kernel - Cosmology
Attention Clustering
Subversive Loitering, Fugitive Spaces, Chance Encounters
Collective Identity Tool
Quantum Listening/Deep Attunement tool for virtual spaces.
Minimalist Infrastructure - aesthetically miminal infrastructure that reinforces ideas of intentional low-resource use and impace
A protocol for maintaining relationships when we adapt new technologies that fundementally reshape the ways we relate and make worlds.
Neverending metaphors as nodes of inspiration
Computer networks and mycelium are often used as simile and metaphor for each other.
what of a spore, or a carrier bag full of mushrooms seeding spores, as traveling server. mycelial metaphors, moving webs?
How might a mushroom model the emergence of ephemeral gatherings?
In “Let’s Become Fungal, Mycelium Teaching and the Arts” Yasmine Ostendorf Rodriguez articulates a view of the world as shimmering and full of spores. Potential all around us - any set of ideal conditions or relationships might grow into a beautiful interconnected web of life, and bring forth a mushroom, which nourishes many. Is that a kind of server?
What kind of infrastructure holds the seeds of community?
If the carrier bag is how an individual carries seeds to share with community, what is the community meeting spot? What kind of infrastructure can we look at to understand the impulse to gather resources in a single shared space?
Extending the metaphor of the carrier bag and all the seeds and foods it holds, might we think of granaries? And places where food and beverage are shared? A barter market, a restaurant… What space becomes available when there is a common gathering point, when labor is reduced through collective efforts, through physical supports for inter/dependences?
Musings from Mar 9 2024:
A conversation about community organizing in the liminal space after Exploring the Mycoverse, a bimonthly myco-culture club, with my good friend and organizer Aaron, leads us down the path of conversation towards notions of Third Places. Especially in regard to how they were deliberately hamstrung in response to the Civil Rights Movement (Linked: Isabella Segalovich has a great short form history of this). Where people hang out aimlessly, with no pressure to produce or spend, is where a deeper community forms, with much less effort by community organizers, and it's then much easier for that community to organize around their needs - frequent visitors to such spaces are far more in-the-know about the state of the community and what issues affect them, and energy that would be spent just getting everyone on the same page and in the same place can be better utilized for strategic planning and actions. With the loss of third places and the illegalization of loitering and the beuracratization and regulation of large communal gatherings, there's no longer default placse for people to just hang out and organically form community and organize together. Not as much, at least, and not in the physical realm, where it’s often financially impossible to hold a space that is not centered around productivity or is not otherwise vulnerable to disruption by atagonistic interests. Where then, do people spend their aimless time? Everyone loiters online, these days, on social media. The aimless moments of the day, where you might once have wandered to the local barbershop or hung out in the park after sunset, are replaced with the chance encounters online. The result is that there is an analogue to the communal gathering space where people are free to talk about their experiences and organize collective care - and hence why online organizing has revitalized some social movements! But of course, we must consider all the vulnerabilities of relying on spaces curated by the oligarchs of the attention economy, with all the algorithmic interference and collaboration with state actors and hegemonic interests. Plenty of discourse around this in regards to TikTok ban…
Is decentralized social media the answer The barriers to entry and slightly steeper learning curve seem to slowly be smoothing out, but at the same time players like Meta are making moves to plug into the federated ecosystems. What will this bring? The shape of the structures feels more akin to an ecosystem, many gathering points sharing many kinds of resources, in many different places, but still interconnected. Something about it doesn’t quite feel like home yet. Familiarity with the platform? Is it a sense of the embodied care that exists in the UI?
What is it about the dumplings you’ve eaten your whole life from the stall on the corner that signal to you that you’ve returned to a home that you only visit every couple years, one that is situated in one of the most rapidly changing cities in the world? Constancy, familiarity, habit… hard things to transform, hard to adjust, how does one grieve a shifting world when their senses are constantly on the verge of burnout from a near-constant barrage of information?
What does it mean that our gathering of places of habit are constrained to a virtual realm in which we might activate only one or two of our senses? Can we still hold space for each other? Can we still tend to each other’s souls?
Ephemeral, Cyclical Infrastructuring
Useful Metaphors from Server Infrastructures (or are they borrowed from other infrastructures to begin with?)
Load Balancing -
If I am a server, sharing the load with a group of servers, how do we best distribute the tasks and load of organizing? Are there useful protocols to adapt from computation to social movements? In this metaphor, is server maintenance equivalent to self-care? In an office hours, Chelle is exploring a podmap…. How does community intersect and overlap, and are there community members that can share the load between different communities? What does it mean to act as your own load-balancer?
Bittorrent - Seed Ratios
I also remember being fascinated with bittorrent and the way that different private servers set up their ratio rules. It’s a little like how Robin Wall Kimmerer articulates the Honorable Harvest:
If you’re downloading more than you’re uploading, you’re considered a “leecher”. While you’re uploading, you’re a seeder. Many private torrent sites have rules to keep their torrents alive, and thriving with multiple seeders. It becomes a point of pride or a well regarded act of community service to continually seed the files that are very infrequently in demand. Others incentivize contributions to the community by allowing you to trade your upload ratio, or gain upload ratio from participation. On some, community members set bounties of their upload ratio to request specific files to be shared. In this way some private torrent sites have surpassed entities like the Library of Congress in maintaining access and archiving rare materials. Looking again to seeds - how many seeds does the planting of one seed beget? How can one care for any given lineage of seeds? How do we ensure a reciprocal exchange that keeps a community interacting, even once everyone has received nourishment or something they desired from the community?
Serverless Architecture. Dividing everything up leads to loneliness…
friction creates opportunities for connection and mutually autonomous relationships?- what do we lose in convenience?
Where hardware benefits from lower energy use if you can lessen the amount of interactions any given task takes… within a social fabric, lessening the amounts of interactions is akin to plucking threads out of the weave. Eventually the fabric becomes full of holes, too sheer to hold all the seeds in the carrier bag…
What happens when we offload all the infrastructural elements and activities upon which trust are built and relationships are made to third parties? We see this in our everyday lack of relationship with the long chains of people who make our living possible. While few of us are able to meet a farmer and buy directly from someone who produced our food, how many relationships do we have where we can fully know a person? How fragmented is our trust and relationship, if we are not able to know the ways in which the person halfway across the world who produces one widget of a contraption we use, moves in the world and cares for the world? and They themselves have no way of knowing who the food they eat comes from? How can we address harms, or make real collective dreams, when there is no relationship to the people who make the daily implements of our world?
What would designing infrastructure look like if there was an intentional cyclical nature, of allowing it to sit still and not add new features, maintenance or a hospice state, only to then rebuild that same software with all the lessons learned, every once in a while?
Thinking of the shrine in Japan that gets rebuilt every 12 years. A technology for knowledge preservation. Since it’s handcrafted and requires many skilled people to build and maintain the knowledge, it fosters deep connections between the people who bear the knowledge through the passage of time.
Surely some tech projects, especially some open source code projects, probably feel this way. Is anyone actually rebuilding the whole thing from the ground up every generation? Does this limit the complexity of a system in a good way?
Server Project
In typical fashion, I'm bouncing from idea to idea, not yet delving into the implementation. Maybe something cohesive will form from all of these disparate orientations:
Minimalist Infrastructures - A Server is a place to hold things in one place that many people can access. The granary, into which everyone can unload and fill their carrier bags. A collective effort to build structures that are a boon to many involved. An act of collective care, of opening up spaciousness for response-ability and creativity.
Mar 19 2024
A minimalist, server like (or server maintainer-like) gesture. Binder Clips Attached to a Lightpost.
How to improve an existing infrastructure? Does removing the need for staples or tape address any needs for people in the neighborhood I live in? Can we reduce some of the resources needed for anyone who wants to to be able to post a sign on this light post near where I live? What if I print the sign for them?
A design to experiment with. Binder clips, attached to the lightpost. It’s reusable. In theory, reduces the need for stapleguns or tape. Maybe less microplastics and resource use if these remain up for a long time? How many staples or rolls of tape replace the embodied energy of 4 binder clips and the double sided adhesive tape I’ve used to put this up? Does offering to print signs for people reduce the need for some printers somewhere in my neighborhood? It could be cute to do a hand drawn rendition of whatever posters people send here.
A prototype, the vision: but lots of rain forecast. I’d rather not laminate the posters. Feels like excessive resource use, which is somewhat counter to the idea of this experiment. I’m about to be away any not be able to maintain this. Maybe better if I do this when I’m around to maintain it. Or I can set it up where I end up…
More testing and iterations to come….
Reducing the barriers to entry, somewhat. Rain and my own fleeting presence in a given place have hindered this project! What is infrastructure if the structure crumbles so easily? Something to revisit, repair, re-iterate.
Musings from 2024 Mar 16
Potato Internet, Caroline Sinders - Community Codes Of Conduct.
Alice shared this event in our discord. Caroline Sinders has setup a sculpture with several potatoes that in the full install would be submerged in salty water with an anode and cathode in them and wiring to power the raspberry pi that hosts the Potato Internet. The rest of the internet consists of three e-ink pricetags that are also powered by potatoes, which can display a short message that is submitted to the potato internet through the web portal. A single message is displayed for 24 hours. Caroline proposes a question regarding a Community Code of ConductThe conversation becomes rapidly conceptual. Was this the intent? Or Could we have spoken concretely about the specifics of the potato internet.
A proposal arises - how do we define community?
A proposal:
- Communities of Circumstance
- Communities of Attention
- Communities of Intention
Potato Internet as a Community of Intention
- Gathered to maintain the ephemeral network which is powered by potato batteries.
- Potato Internet as a distillation of the infrastructure of the internet into a microcosm in which to practice rewriting the code of conducts that we operate projects like local networks, mesh networks, community tech endeavors with. Minimal by design, due to the potatoes, and the display devices. What considerations arise? Keeping the technology as simple as possible opens up the ability to explore all of the potential use/abuse cases in a short period of time.
femke snelting - codes of conduct. geek feminism is referenced.
The collaborative design of a code of conduct around such a simplified representation of a participatory internet project is such a fruitful practice for reframing our relationship with social media and the internet and any collectively maintained infrastructure.
Restructuring infrastructure for Desirable futures
The base layer of the interfaces between social structures and the world, or horizontally between the different “hardware layer” systems of the world, could use some re-storying to restore better modes of relationship. One could think of these as Kernel, Assembly, and Firmware Rewrites:
Proposed Kernel and Firmware Rewrites,
base level protocols for interfacing with the world on a societal level…
protocols that consider interspecies connections?
TIME:
It seems like there's a great need to re-write the code for how we societally interact with time. How to escape the chronic condition and return to some sloshy oceanic time? A time of shared connection and experience?
Suggested readings:
Jenny Odell - Saving Time
Byung Chul Han - The Scent of Time
Bayo Akomolafe - These Wilds Beyond Our Fences
Estelle Ellison - Abolish Time
Rasheedah Phillip’s BlackQuantum Futurism: https://web.archive.org/web/20230206193000/https://timezoneprotocols.space/generator/
Kernel Patches for Infrastructure Building in Ephemeral Spaces
Linger a moment outside of the structured happenings…
make your self available for connection
[A laugh is a packet that opens a port
So too a warm smile
A greeting, of any sort
Though to what degree that port is opened
is often a question of how vulnerable you are willing to be,
opening portals of your own for others to enter and see]
[Releasing a sense of apprehension, of guardedness, of self-censorhship)
is met with mirrored behavior]
[Every moment is a spore, holds the potential for hyphenation, weaving of webs, collecting, sharing and digesting of nourishment]
If you note a difference - hold it tender as potential for new collaborative understandings. let curiosity lead.
If you note a similarity - tend to it by letting your empathy lead
Let this be the spore of longer poetry...
PLATFORM FATIGUE & FEATURE CREEP
A tension between adding features, maintenance,
Do the protocols underlying these apps change at the pace of development? Every new feature adds complexity - but perhaps since most of it is built upon the base layer of functionality, and reverse compatibility is desirable for maintenance and stability of userbase,
the neverending addition of features and the ever growing need for resources b
How often do we need to reinvent the wheel, to justify selling new wheels? What if our wheels were made of a faster disintegrating plant material, so that the iteration process was interlinked with a natural timeline of decay? Complexity limited by the eventual need to remake the system from raw materials? A seasonal cycle? Would this process be more evolutionary? What is lost in a continual cycle of renewal? What is gained? What is lost from the neverending improvement cycle of longstanding technologies? What would it lok like
Is platform fatigue a serious threat to our ability to reorganize society? What about the UX has changed since the early days of the internet when going to multiple different forums with a password felt simple, like walking down a street filled with the third places where various niche interest groups convented? Signal noise problem?
Sympoetic Ecofabulatory - A Living Infrastructure for Interspecies Collaborators.
2024 Feb 20
Last week at a monthly gathering of interspecies collaborators I co-faciliate, the question of an online discussion group came up - Discord group? Signal chat? Some group members had hesitance about one platform or another. As facilitators of the gatherings we wonder about the possiblity of a platform that can prioritize in person conversations first, while allowing continued discussion inbetween our intermittent meetings. What happened to the ol phpBB bulletin board? Let alone the physical information kiosks? Some places still have them, but that doesn’t seem to work well in a city as spread out as LA. What can we do to make a space to hold conversations?
2024 March 9
We’re planning our next event. Normally we’ve lead our events as a guided practice of some sort. The lingering time around the beginning and end of the guided practice becomes the space for the conversations and connections between people to form. It’s never enough. What if we intentionally create a space for that to happen? What does that look like? I circle back to the thoughts of carrier bags and granaries. A swapmeet! That’s it… A temporary server to gather in in real time, to linger and share nourishment, culture, and weave connections.
does a circle surrounded by circles imply both gathering and sharing?
Quantum Listening, Oceanic Feeling, Collective Movement and Attention
Romain Rolland's term for the sensation of "being one with the external world as a whole."
Jackie Wang argues in Oceanic Feeling and Communist Affect, that attending to this sensation is part of a worlding praxis that aligns with a liberatory mindset. To catalyze the collective action towards a communally desired future, we must learn to move as if interconnected, as if sloshing around inside one endless and world encompassing body of water.
Another way of thinking of entanglements, of being chthnonic, of what Sophie Strand terms Ensoilment https://www.artpapers.org/i-will-not-be-purified/. To become substrate for potential lives, to digest and synthesize the
A stone for lichen to grow on, a partnership of several vastly different beings, arranged in a configuration that’s more than the sum of it’s parts.
these are the infrastructures of life.
“Survival is a promise. A covenant between my ancestors, my living communities and this body that is 100% composed of the love that connects them.” - Alexis Pauline Gumbs - Love as infrastructure of survival…
At a MOCA Event, Quantum Listening - Sonic Architectures, which Moderator/Curator Tiffany E. Barber stated was part of a goal of bringing people and their perspectives which have historically been marginalized and excluded from spaces such as the artistic Institution of MOCA, Andrew Thomas Huang expressed a reframing of Eastern practices like Taiji and Yoga that have been co-opted by a Western/colonial/Imperial notion of "Wellness". Wellness being focused on the individual in service of some sort of productivity under captialism, erases the communal context of these practices. Rather, we should consider these practices as technologies for collective attunement - what senses do we moving together in motion
What would a project that enabled these to take place online look like? Is this something that could be hosted on a little server in my bedroom? I toy with ideas. It’s a little beyond my technical ability. What about a performance as a proof of concept, during our final call?
A basic thought of how to synchronize people through an internet video call:
Have everyone open a collaborative whiteboard. Send video feed of this collaborative whiteboard through a feedback loop generated with an analog camera with software effect on it that keys out the background of the whiteboard. So you get a infinitely echoing effect - everyones cursors on the whiteboard receding into a blurry infinity behind them. Mark one side of the whiteboard: IN. The other side: OUT. Ask everyone to being tracking their breath by moving their cursor between each side. Watch as everyone aligns their breathing…
Already Infrastructuring?
What are the ways I’m already serving?
My Own Infrastructure Practices
Tea Time - I carry my tea set with me nearly everywhere. This allows me to set up a little bubble of tea time, a little pause space to share in collective nourishment and conversation that is not associated with the pressures or habits of other beverages. The ritualistic nature of drinking several small cups helps keep people’s attention centered. Many interesting conversations are woven over the tea tray.
Community Care - Showing up consistently to a meetup group, and chipping in to help with programming or setup and breakdown, or constantly reaching out to nearby members about carpooling.
Space Holding - co-hosting sympoetic ecofabulatory, and hosting other events. Making a space for an intentional experience, gathering people who share a desire, making a space for shared resources to collect… A tea table, a granary, a carrier bag for carrier bags…
Endless thanks to
Alice, Oren, Meghna for the wonderful container and all the wonderful seeds and spores you curated and cultivated and shared.
io - for all the ongoing conspiratorial trickster behavior
everyone in the cohort - for the nourishing resonant space